John W. Cornforth, a Nobel Prize-winning Australian chemist, passed away earlier this month at the age of 96. Cornforth first began to explore chemistry when he developed early symptoms of hearing loss. A high school teacher encouraged him to pursue chemistry as a career, saying his deafness would pose less of a handicap in science than in other lines of work.

John W. Cornforth

Cornforth entered the University of Sydney at age 16. By the time he graduated four years later, he was completely deaf.

Cornforth went on to have a long and illustrious career. During World War II, he joined the effort to isolate, identify and synthesize penicillin. In 1975, he won the Nobel Prize for his complicated work deciphering a class of chemical reactions that are important in living organisms. Said the Nobel committee: “This subject is difficult to explain to the layman, as it is a question of geometry in three dimensions.”

Dr. Cornforth retired at age 82, but continued doing research and publishing important papers until age 90. Read more in his New York Timesobituary.

This week, NASA announced that it will partner with the European Space Agency to send a 4,760-pound spacecraft into space to peer out over billions of galaxies in an effort to map and measure the universe. Its purpose: to investigate the mysteries of dark matter and dark energy.

Original funding for "The Secret Life of Scientists and Engineers" was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.